Creation Stories

"When we read about Creation in Genesis, we run the risk of imagining God was a magician, with a magic wand able to do everything. But that is not so."

— Pope Francis, October 2014

Perhaps the most surprising fact about the origin stories of the Bible and science is what they have in common. No, I'm not referring to the Big Bang. It's spiffy that Pope Francis, along with many fellow Catholics and most mainstream Protestants, regards the Big Bang theory as authentic, but a literal mind will find it hard to reconcile the science of cosmogony (cosmic origins) with this:

In the beginning when God created the heavens and the earth, the earth was a formless void and darkness covered the face of the deep, while a wind from God swept over the face of the waters. Then God said, "Let there be light"; and there was light. (Genesis 1:1–3, NRSV)

Wind? Waters? Both of those require oxygen, but it would be billions of years, science tells us, before any oxygen atoms were forged in the first generation of stars and then liberated in supernovae to roam the heavens and pair up with hydrogen.

Not even light could travel freely until long after the Big Bang. What we detect now as the cosmic microwave background radiation was liberated only when the Universe grew large enough to give photons some elbow room in the boiling particle soup. Cosmologists tell us that the Dark Ages that followed the Big Bang lasted some 400,000 years. Yet, Genesis 1 goes on to tell us:

And God saw that the light was good; and God separated the light from the darkness. God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And there was evening and there was morning, the first day.

Day? What's a day before there's a Sun or Earth? Does God have a celestial grandfather clock? If so, it must ticktock mighty slow. For, according to the evidence-based scientific narrative, two generations of stars would rise and fall and nine billion years would drift by before the Earth was born.

The discrepancies only widen as we go on. Genesis 1 continues:

And God said, "Let the waters under the sky be gathered together into one place, and let the dry land appear." And it was so. God called the dry land Earth, and the waters that were gathered together he called Seas. And God saw that it was good. Then God said, "Let the earth put forth vegetation: plants yielding seed, and fruit trees of every kind on earth that bear fruit with the seed in it." And it was so. The earth brought forth vegetation: plants yielding seed of every kind, and trees of every kind bearing fruit with the seed in it. And God saw that it was good. And there was evening and there was morning, the third day.

And God said, "Let there be lights in the dome of the sky to separate the day from the night; and let them be for signs and for seasons and for days and years, and let them be lights in the dome of the sky to give light upon the earth." And it was so. God made the two great lights — the greater light to rule the day and the lesser light to rule the night — and the stars. God set them in the dome of the sky to give light upon the earth, to rule over the day and over the night, and to separate the light from the darkness. And God saw that it was good. And there was evening and there was morning, the fourth day. (Genesis 1: 9–19, NRSV)

Wait. A dome? You mean, like in a planetarium? That doesn't match up too well with our picture of the universe today. As you can readily imagine in the mind's eye, stars in a dome would all be about the same distance from an observer on Earth. What's more, set in a dome, no star could lie before or behind another. But starting in 1838, astronomers observed stellar parallax — the apparent shift of nearby stars in relation to much more distant stars as the Earth trundled around the Sun. As even nearby stars are immensely distant, parallax is hard to measure, but with better telescopes and recording methods, any clinging beliefs that stars lie in a dome vanished. A vast, dark ocean of stars gradually came to represent our sketch of reality.

By the early twentieth century, it became evident that stars gather in gravitationally bound blobs and swirls called galaxies. In 1929, astronomer Edwin Hubble showed that, like raisins in a rising loaf of bread, the galaxies are moving away from one another. The Milky Way, our home state, so to speak, contains about 100 billion stars — more than 10 times the number of people on Earth.

The Hubble Telescope and its space-based successors have shown that the number of galaxies is immense. By the most recent reckoning, there are at least 2 trillion galaxies in the visible universe. If ours is typical, that presses the number of stars beyond counting, let alone naming.

The contemporary scientific account dates the "creation" of the Universe to about 13.8 billion years ago. According to the most widely accepted interpretation of the evidence, an event called the "Big Bang" allowed an incomprehensibly tiny and dense dot of positive and negative energy to expand at breakneck speed. As it did, time and space took shape, and the fundamental forces of nature — gravity, electromagnetism, and the atomic strong and weak forces — shook out of the protoforce and largely dictated the course of events thereafter.

None of this matches up well with the biblical account. The idea that a great light (the Sun) and a lesser light (the Moon) separate the light from the dark on a universal scale now looks laughable. The Sun isn't even the most impressive bulb in the stellar string decorating our spiral arm of the Milky Way.

What on Earth (so to speak) do the biblical and scientific accounts have in common? They each come in multiple, contradictory versions.

So far, we've just dipped a toe into the waters of Genesis 1. But there's another account of creation in the Bible. Genesis 2 offers a version that differs in some key details from Genesis...